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snydeq writes "InfoWorld surveys the FOSS-on-Windows landscape, detailing the 10 free open source solutions most likely to unseat proprietary offerings. 'Some, like TrueCrypt and VirtualBox, are real diamonds in the rough: enterprise-grade solutions that deliver many of the same bells and whistles of their commercial brethren, but for free. Others, like Firefox and OpenOffice.org, are already legendary, and their strong followings ensure their continued development and support at levels that rival the best proprietary solutions.'" Rather than click through 10 different pages, the slideshow presentation at least lets you hover over each page's link to preview the author's top picks.

PDFCreator!? I just downloaded and installed it yesterday on a Vista machine at work. I got a Yahoo search toolbar installed after specifically telling the installer app not to do so, and then I also got a 404 redirector installed too!

Not to mention that if you're using OpenOffice (like this article suggests you do) then you don't need a separate PDF app. OO.o generates PDFs just fine.

Which is useful if you only create PDFs from OpenOffice and no other program. PDFCreator installs a PDF printer driver. Once installed, any program that can print can make a PDF. That's much more useful.

I downloaded PDFCreator to give it a spin, but after learning about the toolbar and reading your post I've deleted it without completing the installation.

Wikipedia has further [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDFCreator]details[/url]:

Starting with version 0.9.8, PDFCreator has included a toolbar application, PDFForge Toolbar. Users have reported that this software changes their computer settings. PDFCreator's end-user-license-agreement states that the software will "modify your Microsoft Internet Explorer and/or Mozilla Firefox browser settings for the default search engine, address bar search, "DNS error" page, "404 error" page, and new tab page to facilitate more informative responses as determined by The Toolbar". All instances of "page not found - 404 errors" redirect to a malicious search site. Choosing to not install the toolbar installs it regardless. Some reviewers have termed the toolbar as "malware" and PDFForge has received criticism for including this toolbar with PDFCreator.[8][9][10]

Writing in May 2009 Steven Avery stated:

"PDFCreator, formerly a respected open source product, is causing havoc with a malware install toolbar. Amazingly SourceForge hasn't done anything about this yet and still lists the software, and for many their trust level is shaken as well.[10]"

It has been reported that it is possible to deselect the Browser Addon during installation and that the PDFForge Toolbar can be uninstalled separately.[citation needed]

As I explained in my post, I unticked the 'install toolbar' option, yet I still got a toolbar. Slimy.

On top of that, I got a URL re-director that was *not* mentioned in the install, and didn't go away once I uninstalled the toolbar plug-in in firefox. I had to uninstall the whole application to get rid of the re-director. That is slime on top of slime.

Those instructions are clearly designed to mislead and confuse. How are you supposed to realise the "PDFCreater Browser add-on" is in fact a yahoo toolbar and 404 redirector? If I was installing some software called PDF creator that creates PDFs and part of it was called "PDFCreater Browser add-on" i'd assume it was some kind of necessary component to enable the creation of PDF files. Especially since just before you get the option to not install it, there is a nice piece of decoy hand-waving about opting o

With AviSynth [avisynth.org], you can write scripts for complex video editing tasks. AviSynth with do mixing on the fly in your video player when you run the script. Very nice; it moves complex video editing from the world of point-and-click GUIs to coding!

* Select places menu at the top of the screen* Select connect to server* Select the 'ssh' service type* Type in your details and connect

You'll get a window where files can be manipulated as you would with your own machine. Locations can be bookmarked/categorised with credentials save as you like (although you should probably be using password protected certificates to authenticate yourself - which Ubuntu will also take care of). WebDav, FTP, Windows shares work the same, out o

Media Player Classic is such a lifesaver. It ranks up with Firefox as "immediate install on every machine I touch", just in order to make the pc bearable. Most mediaplayers, commerical (MS & Apple, for instance) or free, have unbearable interfaces. Absolutely unbearable, with irregular window borders, pretend mechanical knobs, bizarre menus structures...

Didn't work when I tried it for a simple FTP transfer because of default settings I couldn't figure out how to undo.

Your own inability to use the program does not imply that it is a horrible program. I am sure that there are many people here that would extol the virtues of vi or emacs, not because either is easy to use, but because they are powerful. Furthermore, complaining that one product sucks, but failing to provide a better alternative is not constructive. It may be true, but it is not h

VirtualBox is clearly in the early stages of becoming a very useful program, but so far it lacks everything that could make it an "enterprise level" application. Let's revisit that classification when it does branched snapshots and virtual machine migration (preferably live)

No kidding. You can't even easily run guests without being logged in, which makes it next-to-useless for headless vm hosts. It's damned good for desktop virtualization, but if they want me to move over to it, it needs to run guests fro

Not going to be the next firefox in terms of popularity... but lisp in a box is just nice for getting into lisp/emacs on any platform. Used to be a big learning curve how to set slime, etc. up and all that.

Man, don't be dissing Lisp. Lisp is the foundation of a lot of the niftier concepts in lots of languages today, and is considered by most computer scientists to be one of the most perfect languages ever invented. Yeah, all those parentheses are a pain, but they consistently push you to do the Right Thing, and for me one of the highest complements I can place on non-Lisp code is "that looks almost Lisp-ish".

And if you don't believe me, believe these guys:"The greatest single programming language ever designed." - Alan Kay"Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot." - ESR"LISP being the most powerful and cleanest of languages, that's the language that's the GNU project always prefers." - RMS"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." - Philip Greenspun"These are your father's parentheses. Elegant weapons, for a more... civilized age." - Randal Munroe

Is the reason I actually stuck with Windows 2008 Server when evaluating my choices for a home NAS solution with easy-to-use partition encryption that doesn't get in my way and yes, I had tried out different Linux and *BSD-based solutions, but in the end, Win2008+Truecrypt was simply too powerful and too convenient to not pick as the clear winner. I might look at FreeBSD and OpenSolaris again when ZFS crypto finally gets implemented to see how it fares on the usability side of things.

Never heard of the application. Summary say it is extremely limited. Is there a reason, other than complexity of interface, that one might choose it over gimp. I suppose gimp does not have all the shapes of a drawing program, but it does paint, with colors.

Is there a reason, other than complexity of interface, that one might choose it over gimp.

"complexity of interface" is a pretty damn good thing to base a decision on.

I suppose gimp does not have all the shapes of a drawing program, but it does paint, with colors.

When you have to look up documentation [gimp.org] to figure out how to draw a straight line in the Gimp, and that documentation is somewhat condescending, you might start to think that the Gimp isn't actually that good for simple tasks.

Paint.net is 1.6 megabytes and does everything most people need, even people who take a lot of photos but don't need to go into professional-level editing. It's one of the most impressive programs on any platform.

Except that the source code does not seem to actually be available. The download page that is linked from the license page does not say anything about source code except how it is licensed. Looking at the source of the page shows a commented out section that talks about how to get the source code and links here [dotpdn.com]. However the link to the source code on that page is dead.

Also, the license has an exception for the GPC code, which is free for non-commercial use only. Admittedly, I don't know how much functio

Paint.NET is a real good middle ground between MS Paint and Photoshop. The interface is lightning fast and neat, real easy to use, and pretty powerful. For a home user who occasionally has to edit graphics and/or photos, it's a neat program and it's free. Sure beats MS Paint at anything. If you're used to the GIMP, stick with it.

Because not everyone wants to retouch photos or do other complex things requiring a tool like GIMP. Many times, simpler is indeed better. If I'm just drawing a simple diagram, and don't want to futz around with some Visio-like tool (such as Kivio) since it'll take me three times as long, I just start up a simple paint tool, such as KolourPaint in KDE.

Paint.NET is extremely small (1.6 MB download). It uses the.NET framework so it's well integrated with the Windows GUI. Unlike the GIMP it's very easy to use. It's fast. It doesn't have as many function as GIMP sure, but what it does have, it's nicer to use than GIMP by miles.

1) It's rock solid stable. GIMP is crash-prone on Windows. I swear I've caused it to crash by missing a toolbar button and clicking inbetween.2) It has easy to create extensions, vastly enhancing capabilities. Stuff like, altering the colour tone of multiple images to match. You give it an old-style Western scene, and it'll turn any photo into that. Like most gimp-lovers, you seem to think "ease of use" counteracts "powerful". Software can be both. Paint.net is simplistic, powerful,

Yes, calling VirtualBox "enterprise grade" stretches it a little bit. It's a nice tool and they're making consistent progress, but I wouldn't recommend it for mission-critical solutions. There are just too many little bugs, also regressions in new versions. Most of them get fixed over time, but I still have to work around some things. VMWare on the other side has "always worked" for me.

Surely VLC [videolan.org] should have made this list? While it isn't exactly pretty it is very much FOSS, cross platform, and removes the need to download endless quantities of random codecs.
Definitely better that Media Player classic in my book.

It's probably worth mentioning Media Player Classic Home Cinema, which is a fork of MPC that contains (among other things) integrated codecs via ffdshow. I prefer using this to VLC because of the various weird GUI bugs in VLC, plus the accurate seeking MPC-HC has compared to VLC. VLC comes a close second though, and first place if you aren't running Windows.

It's really bizarre that the article author included Paint.Net in a list of "best free open source software for Windows", because the source code - as the author himself even admits - is *not* available for free download for any of the recent versions of Paint.Net.

If that wasn't enough, there's been no new release of Paint.net for almost a year and I'd have thought GIMP (or GIMPShop) was a clearly superior (and fully open source) graphics package on Windows anyway.

If we're discussing enterprise ready winners, why not talk about Zimbra and Alfresco?

The main reason suits don't want to talk about leaving Microsoft or considering FOSS on their desktop is because they are very much tied to Outlook. And right now Sharepoint is Microsoft's new big gun.

Lets talk about Zimbra. I've tried to bring up the following subjects on the Zimbra forum but can't get straight answers. What is disaster recovery on Zimbra like? Does it have single mailbox / single message restore functionality? For example, if dumb user Jane tells me that she deleted the super duper important email that she absolutely needs to have, do I need to restore the entire mail database, or can I go into the most recent backup of Jane's mailbox and restore the single email that she deleted?

Believe me, I'd love to walk away from Exchange, but as of yet, I have not seen what I consider to be a credible replacement. Since a lot of the data in my organization is highly confidential, services like GMail are right out.

One could argue that the best thing that could happen to windows is to be replaced with Ubuntu.

Not that I completely agree with that reasoning. Driving the computer illiterate masses into Linux just causes headache for the Linux savvy that have to spend their days explaining to people where the Start menu is in Linux.

I did a recent verbal survey in a literature class at the community college I am attending and 45% of the class was using it exclusively(other then the forced use of MS Office at the college labs).

I did it again at the end of the semester and that number had changed to 60%. It is possible that my first survey prompted the increase, but I also asked if the newer users preferred it over MS's product. ALL of them said they did. I then asked WHY.

The most common answer was that it was completely cross-compatible as far as opening MS created files...and it was free. The students could create files on the school MS system, then go home and open it in Open Office. And that it was free. Another reason they gave was that it was free.

I understand that there are some issues with bouncing back and forth between MS Office and Open Office, but most students choose one or the other. And its free.

As you might expect, students are not keen on spending upwards of $200 on MS Office when they can get Open Office for...free.

Hmmm, I fought with MS Office 2007 today and lost the battle. I had to complete the task with OpenOffice. The document reached a size where things started to screw up at random: Paragraph numbers disappear, the table of contents screws up, the bullets menu becomes greyed out so I cannot apply bullets to a list (but doing them one at a time by typing an asterisk worked). Gawddammit.

So people who keep saying that MS Office is better than OpenOffice are probably only working on one page memos. In my experi

This the kind of thing that makes me question... why? Sure MSOffice is great, has nifty features and comes with most business computers; OO.o comes with a substantial number of the features of MSOffice as well as a few of its own, cost effectively. OO.o is great for fixing MSOffice faults, true. But if you are know you doing a document that is larger than a quick semi-informal letter, why the hell are *s/geeks/nerds/technocrats* not using latex, or even just Lyx Kile or whatever? Y'know it puts out professi

Though Base is a heck of a lot more usable now than it was in OO.org 2, it still has a long way to go to match Access 2000, much less anything more recent. No ODBC connections to multiple outside databases (at least that I could find), the form builder is still explicitly designed to create the worst-looking forms imaginable, importing into Base databases, especially with larger data sets, is ssssllllloooooowwwww (we're talking 15-30 minutes to import a 60,000 row Excel sheet, something which Access pulls off in well under 5), no multiuser support unless you're willing to host your own SQL server... yeah. It's better than it used to be, mind you - at least it's now obvious that you can actually code macro events against state changes on your forms. That wasn't true in 2.

Calc is better than it used to be - seriously, Sun went out of their way to clean up the worst of the problems in the upgrade to 3, which I'm very appreciative for. That said, it's still a little flaky on larger data sets that Excel seems to handle a little better. No personal anecdotes of pain on Calc 3, though, which is far more than could be said for Calc 2, so no real complaints.

That's rather impressive given the fact MS Office is pirated up the wazoo. People at my uni would much prefer pirating MS Office instead of having to spend the time learning OpenOffice. It's free either way.

I know many people who have used OpenOffice and not one of them thinks it holds its own against MS Office. Including myself.

OO.o will:

* Export to PDF* Import a plethora of formats that MS Office can't open.* Export to Open Document Format (MS Office 2007 with SP2 will do this, but previous versions can't)* Allow me to easily install and manage extensions* Run natively on Mac, Linux and Windows* Doesn't cost a penny.

We pay $400 a pop for MS Office licenses here at work. Novell's Go-oo fork implements better macro support and such which is one of the few complaints I get about vanilla OO.o. So, a free product that implements 99% of the paid product's features, including every feature I've ever needed over the past 20 years, and then does several things that MS Offiice can't do, can't hold its own?

* Export to PDF and XPS (Beginning in SP2). Also, using beerfree programs like CutePDF and the like, you can simulate OO.org's PDF exporting abilities in any Windows program.
* Import a plethora of formats that OO.org can't open. Go ahead - import a Microsoft Works file. I dare you.
* Export to ODF if you install the Sun ODF Plugin [sun.com]. There was an article here fairly recently about MS' native ODF plugin being extremely incompatible with OO.org's implementation of the sta

What an idiotic post. Outlook is a giant turd of a program, and the only reason I use it is because my stupid employers always require it. For my own email, I use gmail, like millions of other people, and Gmail has a calendar too which works great. As a bonus, it's faster to read email using Gmail (with its servers located who-knows-where), than it is for me to read email using Outlook which is located on my own machine. How'd MS manage to accomplish that?

Thats just blatantly untrue for me anyway - i am using the VirtualBox open source edition extremely frequently and i get USB support out of the box for input devices, mass storage, etc. So far i havent found anything 'bad' about it, and trust me, i have been looking. Are you using the latest versions and have you actually *tried* the USB support?

Frankly i like VirtualBox better than any other commercial or open source solution for virtualization, and i have tried them all. Maybe when a good microkernel virt

I was using 2.1.4 from the Ubuntu repositories. VirtualBox themselves still list it as only being in the closed Source version only (http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Editions) and a quick look at the release notes doesn't show a change in policy, but someone else replied that they've got USB with the OSE in the latest version, so maybe it is in v3 OSE

Certainly the closed source edition has very good support for USB and they say proprietary features may be included in the OSE in the future. Can anyone clarify?